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Theophylact's Flattery "Exiled" Him to Ohrid

Can you make too good an impression on someone important? Theophylact
may have thought so.On this day, January 6,
1088, he gave an enthusiastic speech before Alexius, Emperor of
Byzantium, warmly praising the emperor and his mother Anna Dalassena. He
crowed over the emperor's conquest of parts of the Balkans. The emperor
was a diplomat and servant of the church, said Theophylact. His speech
had unintended consequences.

Evidently the emperor was pleased. In Byzantium (the eastern half of
the old Roman Empire), church posts were under government control. They
were often given as rewards. The emperor promoted Theophylact to be
archbishop of Ohrid in Bulgaria (now Macedonia).

For Theophylact, who was a cultured man, the promotion was like a
sentence of exile. In Constantinople, he had libraries, palaces, and
shimmering architecture. He taught the sons of important men.
Theophylact even taught prince Constantine Doukas, who was expected to
become emperor; and he was a friend to the boys beautiful mother,
Maria of Alania. By transferring to Bulgaria, he would have to leave all
that behind and many friends, too. Like other snobby Byzantines, he
considered Ohrid a barbarian backwater. But churchmen were civil
servants, who had to go wherever the emperor ordered, so he went.

As Theophylact soon found out, he was leaving behind even more than
he had thought. When he drew near to Ohrid, a horrid stench stunned his
nose. Evidently sanitation standards were not as high as in
Constantinople.

Byzantium's conquest of Bulgaria still rankled Ohrid.
Theophylact's coming rubbed salt in the wounds of its defeat.
Formerly, the Bulgarians had had their own patriarch. Resentful of their
loss of independence, they greeted Theophylact with jeers and insults.
To spite him, they sang a victory song, extolling their nation's past
triumphs. They were not consoled by the fact that the emperor had given
local bishops the privilege of consecrating Theophylact or that the
emperor had confirmed that Bulgaria's church would be independent of the
Patriarch of Constantinople. Theophylact was an outsider, and they knew
he was expected do his part to keep Bulgaria glued to the empire.

For his part, Theophylact did not like Bulgaria, which he called
"of all provinces of the empire, the most pitiable." He was
homesick and begged friends to help get him released from the place.
After a visit home, he wrote, "So I return to the Bulgarians, I who
am a true Constantinopolitan and, strange though it is, a
Bulgarian."

Yet he had compassion on Bulgaria's poor. In several letters he
pleaded for tax relief and pointed out that one child in five was seized
to be sold into slavery as payment for taxes. He urged a show of mercy
"lest the patience of the poor be finally exhausted."

One way that Theophylact tried to forget his homesickness was to
write. 130 of his letters were published. These are hard to understand
today because he wrote in a "puzzle" style used by educated
men of that era. Even so, they are full of useful bits of Byzantine and
Bulgarian history and satirical comments. He came to love Slavic
literature and Slavic church heroes and wrote a life of St. Clement of
Ohrid and retold the story of the fifteen martyrs buried at Strumitsa,
not far from Ohrid. In "exile," he also wrote commentaries on
the gospels and on Paul's epistles.

Amazingly, four hundred years later, Theophylact's January 6th speech
was still generating fallout. A German scholar named Erasmus discovered
the archbishop's writings. He borrowed some of Theophylact's ideas for a
satire called In Praise of Folly. That book, by poking fun at
wrongs in the church and society, helped bring about the Protestant
reformation in Europe.